Friday, July 8, 2016

Cheese & Football Feast day 20: France

The last of the quarter finals in the Euro 2016 football tournament was France vs Iceland and whilst Iceland had what seemed to be the entire Icelandic nation cheering for them it was to be their last game. The dish I chose for my cheese feast was French Tartiflette. Great cold weather comfort food, so in keeping for a game against Iceland. This is a glorious mixture of potatoes, smoked bacon, white wine, fromage frais and Reblochon cheese.
I found a french bottled beer with a picture of Eric Cantona on the label, and in the same week read a rumour that Cantona has voiced an interest in being the England team's next manager. Now that would be a change for us, but I suspect it was just gossip.

I was delighted to have home grown potatoes ready in time for this recipe which made it all the more special. I am growing some potatoes in large pots at home as well as a few on the allotment. The pot grown ones were ready first.

It took me a while before I realised why there were no Tartiflette recipes in my old classic french cook books. It was apparently invented in the 80's to help sell Reblochon cheese. I looked at quite a few internet recipes, many of which had a large amount of cream, which I did not want. Some fried the potatoes, which gain I was happier to avoid.
So in the end I just made a couple of changes to the recipe published here: Guardian's Tartiflette. I did not fry the potatoes after boiling them and I used 2 heaped tablespoons of creme fraiche in place of all of the double cream. If you use more cream you would get more sauce, but my version did not taste dry and a small left over portion reheated very well the next day.

This was the first time I had cooked reblochon cheese and it worked really well. This has been one of our favourite dishes of the cheese feast so far and I am looking forward to cooking it again. I think you need well flavoured waxy potatoes to make the dish special so take some care in selecting them.

Next, onto the semi-finals, the fisrt of which was Wales vs Portugal and I made Glamorgan 'Sausages'.